1 April 2009

Ok folks, I assume all of you have heard about the Microsoft Internet Explorer Uninitialized Memory Remote Code Execution Vulnerability also known as ms09-022 which has been published on Feb 10 2009. This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on Windows systems that are running IE7, the range of the affected systems varies from WinXP SP2 up to Win2K8 (the Server Core installation option is not affected) releases.

As in many classic client-side attacks, end user's interaction is vital so to take control of his system and all our victim needs to do is visit the malicious page. The specific flaw exists in the handling of document objects. In particular, when an object is appended and deleted in a specific order, memory corruption occurs; successful exploitation leads to remote compromise of the affected system under the credentials of the currently logged in user.

Some of you may have already played with it extensively in your labs or in real environments as metasploit, Core Impact, Immunity CANVAS and other frameworks have included this exploit since the early days of its disclosure, however, some others may have difficulties with this one. Ok, enough with the theory, the guys from TippingPoint and the Zero Day Initiative who discovered the vulnerability did the hard work for us, and now have left us to experiment with our creativity. The exploit looks like the code below, the only thing you need to add is the payload in URL encoding scheme which easily can be generated using msfpayload from metasploit framework:

Then save the page in html, prepare your netcat listener on port 4444 and trick your victim to open the html file. If you prefare, you can always use more advanced payloads such as meterpreter, in addition, if you target more than one users you should consider using the multi/handler module.